Free The Distant Hours by Kate Morton Page B

was tossed in amongst the crushing constellation of childhood experiences. It was all topsy-turvy, you see. Grown-up people didn’t get lost, not in my world: it was the province of children, of little girls like me who made a habit of following their daydreams and dragging their feet and generally Failing to Keep Up.
    But not this time. This time, inexplicably, earth joltingly, it was my mum who’d slipped through the cracks. Dad and I were waiting in a queue to buy a souvenir booklet when it happened; we were shuffling forward, following the line, each of us keeping silent company with our own thoughts. It wasn’t until we reached the counter and both stood mutely, blinking first at the shop assistant, then at one another, that we realized we were somehow without our traditional family mouthpiece.
    I was the one to find her again, kneeling in front of a doll’s house we’d already passed. It was tall and dark, as I recall, with lots of staircases, and an attic running along the top. She didn’t explain why she’d returned, saying only, ‘There are actual places like this, Edie. Real houses with real people living in them. Can you imagine? All those rooms?’ A twinge at the edge of her lips and she continued, the soft, slow lilt of recitation: ‘ Ancient walls that sing the distant hours .’
    I don’t think I answered her. For one thing there wasn’t time – my dad turned up right then looking flustered and somehow personally wounded – and for another I wasn’t sure what to say. Although we never discussed it again, it was a long time before I let go completely of the belief that somewhere out there in the great, wide world, stood real houses with real people living in them and walls that sang.
    I mention the Bethnal Green Museum here only because, as Percy Blythe led me down darkening corridors, Mum’s comment came back to me, bright and brighter, until I could see her face, hear her words, as clearly as if she were standing right next to me. It might have had something to do with the odd sense that pressed upon me as we explored the enormous house; the impression that I’d fallen victim somehow to a shrinking spell and been transported inside a house for dolls, albeit a doll’s house that was rather down at heel. One whose child owner had grown beyond the point of interest and moved on to new obsessions, leaving the rooms with their faded wallpapers and silks, the rush-matted floors, the urns and stuffed birds, the heavy furniture waiting silently, hopefully, for reoccupation.
    Then again, perhaps all that came second. Perhaps it was Mum’s comment that came to mind first because of course she’d been thinking of Milderhurst when she’d told me about the real people in their real houses with lots of rooms. What else could have inspired her to say such a thing? That unreadable expression on her face had been the result of remembering this place. She’d been thinking about Percy, Saffy and Juniper Blythe and the strange, secret things that must have happened to her as a girl when she was transplanted from south London to Milderhurst Castle. The things that had reached across fifty years with a grasp strong enough that a lost letter could make her cry.
    Whatever the case, as I took Percy’s tour that morning, I carried my mum with me. I couldn’t have resisted her if I’d tried. No matter that I’d become inexplicably jealous that my exploration of the castle be my own – a small part of Mum, a part I’d never known, certainly never noticed, was anchored to this place. And although I wasn’t used to having things in common with her, although the very notion made the earth spin a little faster, I realized that I didn’t mind. In fact, I rather liked that the curious comment at the doll’s house museum was no longer an oddity, a mosaic piece that didn’t fit the whole. It was a fragment of Mum’s past, a fragment that was somehow brighter and more interesting than those surrounding it.
    So it